Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Aaron Feaver's bio below. Humankind has seen the Stone Age, the Golden Age, and the Iron Age. Some would argue the 20th century should be called the Silicon ...

Explore the key differences between carbon steel and alloy steel, including their composition, mechanical properties, ...

In the latest of their ongoing talks about the elements, Kai and the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt discuss carbon – what it is, what it bonds with, and how it’s commoditized. Justin mulls on the limited ...

Where would carbon-based life be without carbon? There are 118 known chemical elements, but carbon is the fourth most abundant and perhaps the most important to human life. Everywhere you look, ...

In its purest form, iron is neither exceptionally strong nor hard - in fact, a block of pure iron could be cut with a knife. The addition of carbon and the removal of oxygen are what give iron-based ...

Just because carbon jumps off a bridge, doesn’t mean that tin will too. Scientists have conducted a simple experiment that attaches a simple hydrocarbon to triple-bonded tin atoms, violating a ...

Chemist and writer Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table—a memoir in the form of short stories about elements—closes with a chapter called “Carbon,” which tracks a single atom through time and space.

Chinese researchers have discovered that interstitial carbon in iron-carbon alloys behaves in a superionic, liquid-like state ...

Immediately after the Big Bang, before the first stars in the Universe ever formed, the Universe consisted of hydrogen (element #1), helium (element #2) and pretty much nothing else. Despite ...

Immediately after the Big Bang, before the first stars in the Universe ever formed, the Universe consisted of hydrogen (element #1), helium (element #2), and pretty much nothing else. Despite ...